Stuck with DSL & Patient Expectation

One of the many benefits of being involved with campus ministry with InterVarsity is the opportunity to interact with other IV staff workers. The past several days I was in meetings with some of the most gifted and thoughtful people I know--the Eastern Carolina's area team, a.k.a, the Heavy Hitters.

One highlight for me of our quarterly-ish meetings is time together in Scripture. The other morning we were looking at Isaiah 61, one of the most poetically glorious passages in all of Scripture. Here's a small sample of it:

¹ The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,

³ and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called mighty oaks,
a planting of the LORD
for the display of his splendor.

And it just keeps going, rolling out promise after promise of replacing brokenness with wholeness, sadness with joy, defeat with victory, loss with hope.

As we read through this passage, sat in it and discussed it, our overwhelming sense was, "Yes! We need this! In our lives, on our campuses! Let's see this roll out now!"

But the context calls us up short. These are promises made to people in captivity. And these specific promises will take many, many years to come to their fulfillment.

In fact, it could be argued that the promises don't ever become fully realized until Jesus comes. This is the scroll he picks to read in Luke 4, his debut sermon. After he reads this, he says, "today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

So basically, this promise isn't fulfilled for many, many generations. And the question raised by one of my astute co-workers: what does patient expectation look like?

Does anything in our culture encourage this kind of a long obedience in the same, expectant, patient, hopeful, deliberate, eager waiting direction?

And the follow-up for us as campus ministers: does anything in our student's world help them to think in these terms?

In Jesus' time, the stuff the every-day person handled was soil, seeds, plants, harvest, wood, metal, and the like. Those things required patience over a long-haul in order to achieve hoped-for results. The crop to come in three months captured the daily imagination. Or the table that was forming out of the wood in the shop. Those were the daily imaginings of the average worker in Palestine.

The internet is what shapes our imagination today. Nothing waiting about it, unless you're stuck with a DSL connection which then takes all of two seconds instead of two tenths of a second to download something. Not exactly what the Scriptures are calling us to when it comes to a patient expectation.

All of this simply means that we must work all the more to root ourselves in the culture of the Land of the Trinity over and above the culture(s) of this world. We must learn how Life there works, how promises are made and actually kept there. What waiting looks like. What hoping looks like. What true loving looks like.

We must, in other words, soak ourselves in God. He is our good. And he promises us many things, few of which download as quickly as an internet site does. Where will we learn this foreign Land of the Trinity value of patient expectation?

Only by sitting with Jesus in prayer and in the Scriptures.